Start the video from the 5:00 point of the first of the 15 videos for the debate.
If you are new to religion vs atheism sort of debates, I think a few things to think about, come to your conclusions and opinions on, and keep in consideration as you enjoy the video are:
(the video is below all this)
1) Remember that atheists do not believe in the inerrant bible, nor that it is the albeit man-handled word of God. Well, they don't even believe in god in the first place. Imagine a theist arguing, as Turek does, that
"Yes religious people make up a lot of the evil people in the world now. But that's exactly what the bible says. The Pharisees and..."
Sounds like a good comeback. But what are we really trying to achieve here? Whether the bible says that or not, and whether it was a true historical record of what a holy man said - what does this do? It does not mean that the bible is true or that god exists, or that christianity is the true religion. The actual consequence is nothing. I liken it to what LSAT takers call a shell-game.
Imagine a perhaps more likely and damning argument you might hear:
"The bible says that people will turn away and they think they are wise, but are fools. They rely on their own wisdom but it is he wisdom of man which is bound to fail against the wisdom of god..."
So the atheists were anticipated. Haha! We knew you were coming, atheists. We knew you would be like this. And our bible predicts it just as you are. Stop your futile attempts!
But really, nothing is proved. If the bible was the inspired word of god as it stands, then there you have an argument. But remember, crucially, that the atheist does not believe that in the first place. This argument against them is as much as saying that people in the future will turn away from technology because of irrational fears that technology will turn them into cheese. If 200 years from now, people really turn away from technology, and even if they really do so because of the fear of turning to cheese, it does NOT prove that the fear that technology will turn them into cheese is indeed irrational. substitute "turn them into cheese" to "lead to the demise of their civilization" and the argument is exactly the same - an empty one.
2) The Aquinas "proof" and its many modernized versions. Everything needs a cause and there must have been a first cause. The unmoved mover as Aristotle says. The big bang needed something to bring it about. Can't be natural because "natural" doesn't exist until the big bang brings forth the laws of physics and all these natural science properties of the universe. So, it has to be supernatural.
That first cause...
That unmoved mover...
That supernatural thing...
...is GOD
The problem is this. Are those arguments leading to a compatible proof of God as already defined? Or, are these statements defining "God"?
It is the latter, and because of that, it is circular logic. It is assuming what it sets out to prove. It is saying:
"I'm so full. To be full I must have eaten something. Let's call that something food. So we proved that I ate food".
"Food" was defined and then proved. Meaningless.
Apply that analogy to the first of the 2 questions: is the argument leading to a compatible proof of God as already defined? No. It does not. It is equivocating on the semantics of the word "God"; or it is not compatible.
Equivocating? Yes. It is like the food analogy. We define the something that I ate as food. Then we say we proved I ate food, but this second one is unmentioned but defined as something like "organic material that is edible and digestible by the human". It is not the same definition as "the something that I ate" which could have been a toilet roll.
So they are not compatible in my analogy. But the argument was about God, not food. Are they incompatible? As far as the claims go, maybe not incompatible so I shouldn't say that, but there is no proof that the two instances of the word "God" (or food) refer to the same thing. The first was
God: The first cause. Unmoved mover. That supernatural force.
The second would be something like:
God: The Judeo-Christian God that listens to my prayers, that has some kind of Trinity relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Is Jesus and is the god of Moses and Abraham. Died on the Cross and saved me from my sins.
or it could have been "Allah", or "the flying spaghetti monster"...etc
Where is the connection between God 1 and God 2 ?
That is something the argument fails to follow up on, and no connection seems to be made by modern times apologetics who use this argument.
2[more]) But let's roll back a little and also ask the question: Why should the first cause/unmoved mover/supernatural thing be God? Say someone proposes "an inert onion" to be the first cause. Why not? Because we don't think an inert onion can be a cause-er or move-er. Say we propose it was a kind of energy, a wind that we call "the great wind". Why not? Because we immediately think a wind needs a medium to exist in, is in fact an abstract manifestation of the properties of the medium itself, and also should have needed a cause of its own. Who blew the wind from an initially non-moving position?
This reveals more problems being the "first cause" argument for God. A medium? Well, wouldn't God too need a medium? No it will be argued. God is outside of all these logic and ways we know the universe. He is beyond our understanding. But a wind...it needs mediums. It's the way we know winds. It is a manifestation of differences in pressure in the medium. Well well...to this I say, we have not disproved "the great wind" (nor proved it). We merely have a unfitting analogy between God and wind. We generously attributed the "unknowable" properties to god when we can't explain things, but not to wind. We give the term "god" the benefit of the doubt....whenever there is any doubt. That is why the analogy doesn't work. God needs no movement from an initial position. Wind does. Well, Turek makes this a little confusing in the video by talking about a "choice" that god had to make at first to become a living thing or to come into being. So, chicken or egg? choice or god first? confusing, but unnecessarily so. The problem is the question. Unlike the chicken and egg, we don't know that a choice was made even if we assume that we somehow know that god does. It is the benefit of the doubt given into the definition of the word "god" as used by proponents of god being the first cause that makes sense of why the first cause could not have by itself been the inert onion, the great wind, or more practically...the big bang itself.
BUT, hold on one second again! Why did there have to be an initially non-moving position in the case of wind? If Turek is right about the choice made by god to come into being, he would have to assume that god was first (we furthermore would need to assume time) a sort of non-being. Why these assumptions? The infinite regression arguments of cause and moving led to the "conclusion" that there was a first point of some sort. But this is not tight. As Aquinas argues that something is caused by something, and this latter something itself was caused by something, so on and so forth, so there must have been a first cause. Well, what's he's done is extrapolate through the pattern of one cause itself needing a cause and gone backwards infinitely. Note: the extrapolation is not absolutely logical because we may observe only white swans for as long as we had known swans and yet it is possible (as it did) to find a black swan. However, in reality we accept such extrapolation because often it has practical results. A consequence of this is that science is almost always fallible. Maybe in the future there will be an object with mass but that is immune to the effects of gravity. Maybe natural selection, the very mechanism behind evolutionary theory, will be conclusively disproved. Maybe the next time I sing the vibrations will spark chemical fusion of sound waves and the result teleports itself both back in time and into the future, then back behind me as 3 iodine molecules which alone form together and create a nuclear explosion that wipes out everything on the planet except any strand of hair that has the length of a pi to the power of any prime number according to the 1 millimeter units. Science doesn't actually claim 100% proof (it is said only mathematics can do that), but its models are often accurate for its time and are improving. A man's vision of god, or my studied opinion of an interviewee's personality, surely cannot claim the 100% guarantee that god, the vision, my opinion..etc is true, unless the claim turns out to be correct. In other words, gravitational theory as we know it can be 100% correct if it is indeed correct. Circular? Exactly. But, Aquinas ends his regression unfairly. He only extrapolated until he got sick of extrapolating, biased perhaps to think that there must be a linear pattern with a start rather than a form of circular or abstract infinite regression with no start point. The reason why the First Cause needs no cause of its own is different from why the second cause needed a first cause for apparently no real good reason at all. Say "God" is the First Cause. We have no good reason to say that "God" needed no cause of its own. It's all problems in the definitions. So unlike the previous paragraph, i'm not arguing that the big bang is just as good a First Cause as god. Here, i'm arguing that they are just both as bad! Not because there is a problem with god or the big bang, but because there is a flaw in the presupposition that there must be a First Cause. There is a flaw right away in the infinite regression argument for a finite beginning, with Aquina's proof, Aristotle's argument, and the many variants of it.
and...back to the video:
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